The thirteenth of March already seems a lifetime ago. That’s when Egyptian journalist Namees Arnous (class of 2011, Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, you can read more about her and 40 other classmates here) guided Greg Berger and I on our first visit through Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. The first thing we noticed was a group of thirty or so people gathered on the sidewalk in a heated political conversation. They had no banners or placards. It wasn’t a protest or even really a meeting. It was an impromptu debate of some kind, that made me think of Einstein’s proverbial Village Square.

“Before the revolution,” Namees explained, “it was illegal for five or more people to gather in one place. They would be arrested.”

It was exactly one month after the fall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak and in the following week we would meet and speak with dozens of participants in the historic civil resistance that brought the thirty-years-tyrant down. A month later, the resisters were coming to grips with what all successful revolutionaries have faced throughout history: that after the milestone of “the revolution,” a kind of permanent counterrevolution assembles to try to impose the old order anew. The triumph must then be defended.

Revolution is not a matter of a few tumultuous weeks of crescendo battle at the barricades, nor is it the glorious day of victory (although “the date” is to always be treasured, celebrated, remembered and never denied). The period between January 25 and February 13 of 2011 was, rather, the long and often painful labor to give birth to a new Egypt. And while the old Pharaoh has fled the castle, his lackeys and functionaries still occupy so many of its recesses. To borrow from another famous myth of those lands, the vestiges of the Pharaoh – the regime itself, or The State – now seek to kill the revolution in its infancy. This is what always happens. Truth is, authentic revolution never ends. And what we met and learned from was a critical mass of Egyptians from all walks of life, emboldened and ready to defend it with their all.

In a rooftop apartment a half block from Tahrir Square, and in other locations, the Narco News team set up shop for a week. There, we received community organizers, strategists, bloggers, journalists, unaffiliated people who slept on Tahrir Square during those tumultuous events, doctors who cared for the wounded there, video makers who filmed them (and who designed the series of viral videos that helped bring an unexpected multitude to Tahrir on January 25). On camera, we interviewed Muslims, Coptic Christians, atheists, secularists, leftists of every indole, liberals, and rank-and-file participants of diverse hue.

We asked every one of them a series of twelve questions, which began with this statement:

“We are conducting interviews with people who were involved and direct eyewitnesses to the resistance of January and February 2011 in Egypt that brought the fall of Mubarak. Our questions are about your own personal experience: what you personally saw, what you did, how you did it, the tactics, strategies and decisions you made, and how these events affected your daily life. Unlike many journalist interviews, we are not asking people to analyze ‘what other people did or saw.’ We ask you for your own lived experience, so that people in Mexico and everywhere else around the world who want to do the same things in their lands can see how it was done here. Your personal experience is important to them and to us so we can learn from it. So, please, we request that you answer the questions by telling of what you saw, heard and did during these historic events. Your story is very interesting to the world. And thank you for talking with us and our viewers in many languages!”

The questions ranged from how each individual spent the days leading up to January 25, what they did and experienced on that date, and then on other key dates of the resistance struggle. We asked about the tactical and strategic decisions that had to be made, how they were made, and why specific paths were chosen. We asked whether the January 27 shut down of the Internet hurt or helped the resistance (the answer was unanimous from each and every person, and the consensus may surprise the techno-evangelists who speak so carelessly of “Twitter Revolutions”). We also asked deeply personal questions about whether participating in “the revolution” changed how they see themselves, their life plans, and their relations with family, love, creed and State. The interviews went on and on (the shortest lasted 45 minutes) particularly because most people had so much to say.

One of our Arabic translators and collaborators, a Muslim woman, who had in recent months worked as a “fixer” (interpreter and guide) for other reporters, including from the New York Times and the Washington Post, told us: “We’ve never been asked these questions. The guys from the Times and the Post kept saying ‘we want to interview the leaders of the revolution.’ I told them, ‘We have no leaders.’ They said, ‘Try harder’!”

We were not seeking out “leaders” (those already extensively interviewed or featured by international media) although some of them sought us out when word hit the street that we were asking these kinds of questions. Typically, as one interview went overtime, the person scheduled for the next interview would appear, and it turned out, although these were by and large not “resistance celebrities” or known public figures, that almost everybody knew each other already, and greeted each other with the ecstatic hugs of soldiers who had won a war together. Most of them had met only in the last weeks on a square called Tahrir. They will never forget it, or each other, that is clear.

The collective sum of all their stories is now on video (we felt as if we were smuggling pure gold out of the country, with multiple copies on hidden back ups, hard drives, camera chips and drive sticks, knowing how certain forces of continuing State power have continued to arrest and torture resistance participants, including, recently, one foreign journalist whose throat was slashed defending her video footage appropriated from secret police vaults). The revolution had been “won” but yet it continues, as does the counterrevolution. Everyone we spoke with is painstakingly aware of that reality.

In the coming days and weeks, we have scores of hours of interviews to transcribe (most in the original Egyptian Arabic, but a few in English, too), translate, edit and produce in the form of ten- or fifteen-minute viral videos to be made available free to all on the Internet. And then, additionally, we will translate those videos into other languages, such as Spanish, where speakers are hungry for their content.

This is the closest we’ve ever come to finding something that might be akin to a manual for revolution, for civil resistance, for nonviolent action to topple a violent dictator and for continued struggle to bring the rest of the regime - and all "regime-think" on earth - down with him; a manual narrated not by scholars, academics or authors, but by the participants themselves!

It was also the time, a most special one for me in this life, that I was able to most intensely investigate what Vaneigem calls the study of “how people actually lived during the most extreme revolutionary moments,” and to do so at a moment when memories were still fresh and relatively unburdened by the sort of calcified myths that encase around historical events after they have become history.

What Berger and I and our Egyptian collaborators hope to create from this treasure is not aimed at any documentary film festival or any such nonsense or award. It will go directly to where it came from: the people, with permission, free of any charge or fee, for all to use the materials in their own struggles. Hopefully, we will have considerable parts of the videos ready for the May 2011 School of Authentic Journalism. To the extent we do not, we will press our fellow students and professors there into helping to finish them.

But wait. This incredible experience did not end at the Egyptian border...

Then, on March 19, we headed out of Cairo, taking a couple of new Egyptian friends with us to Madrid to help us lead a four-day workshop on Citizen Journalism and Civil Resistance. There, we shared journalism and media skills, tactics and strategies with 34 others, many of whom were much like us. Some were from lands currently deep in conflict – Afghanistan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen – and others were from other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. And this has led to more international collaborations already and the emboldening of the Civil Resistance Renaissance and the Authentic Journalism Renaissance. Vanegeim's "extreme revolutionary moment" has crossed international borders. What the Egyptians have accomplished is positively infectious for us all. I feel as if we now stand on the threshold of a global culture of civil resistance that no tyrant or State or multinational corporation (another kind of state power) will be able to contain for long.

As usual, I am reluctant to draw detailed conclusions so quickly as to what we heard, saw and lived during these ten or twelve extremely intense days and nights. It is still so new and fresh, and the participants properly narrate much of that anyway. It is a disease of developed world academics and journalists to too rapidly wrap a chaotic story of continuing push and shove with a tidy little bow and greeting card slogan.

Instead, I will follow our own request to the interviewees, for now, and try to speak from personal lived experience, to try and remember, write, and figure out what I saw, heard and lived, and how it might have changed me. It's the inverse of the Heisenberg Principle: it is also true that one can't study something intensely without also being changed by it. I am certain that it mutated me, in a way, to have breathed in it. I am not yet sure exactly how it did. But I am guessing that for the rest of my days I will return, whenever possible, to a Square called Tahrir, where the doors to a new and better future flung open and which now await the rest of the citizens of the world to pass through them.

As a student of rebellion and resistance, when people rise up I pay attention, study and try to learn as much as possible. Humans are at our most creative when we rebel and the moments when many do it all at once are the great engines of innovation, invention and evolution. Any man, woman or child of any age who participates in a grand and successful revolt is forever changed and liberated by the experience. He and she are no longer so easily enslaved or cowered by fear. Rebellions against injustice and tyranny are the single best catalyst through which people become our better selves and fulfill our most human of destinies.

For eighteen days in January and February 2011 the Egyptian people, especially its youths, treated the world to a lesson in civics. Their successful toppling of the thirty year dictator Hosni Mubarak was the very best kind of rebellion because it was disciplined, it was strategically and tactically executed, and the population understood that the justice and freedom it craved would not be found in bloody retribution against the sectors (most demonstrably in Egypt, the Armed Forces) that had propped up the regime, but in peeling those sectors’ support away from it.

A lot has been written and said during and since Mubarak’s fall about how the Egyptians did it, but having lived through other moments like it in other parts of the world I find most of the explanations unsatisfactory. I constantly return to a question raised by the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem:

"By a strange oversight, no historian has ever taken the trouble to study how people actually lived during the most extreme revolutionary moments."

The media, including that part which has been sympathetic and in solidarity with the Egyptian revolt, has proved so far completely incapable at the task of coldly and rationally documenting what exactly the young organizers, authentic journalists, bloggers and other change agents in Egypt did, under extremely difficult conditions, to end a thirty-year dictatorship in eighteen days. That’s where the story remains, largely unreported. And yet most of the protagonists are still alive and able to tell it; time has not yet buried this human-made miracle under ancient ruins for the archeologists to uncover and play guessing games.

And so I begin this essay with an announcement: Narco News and our School of Authentic Journalism will send a team of journalists to Egypt in the coming weeks to find and report that living history. With documentary filmmaker Greg Berger and others, and the wise guidance and counsel of Egyptian authentic journalist Noha Atef, among others who have kept us very well informed throught these historic weeks, we will go to the homes of the organizers and those who broke the regime’s media blockade and record their story in their own words. As authentic journalists do, we will do our best to strip ourselves of any preconceptions, Western and other, about what happened, and instead let those who made it happen explain it to us, and through these pages, to you.

Instead of asking the questions that every media organization is asking them, we will ask the questions that community organizers, students of civil resistance, strategists, tacticians and aspiring revolutionaries everywhere want to know: How did you do it? And how can we do it in our own lands, too?

It was that same thirst to know and understand how successful movements and their change agents make history that led me, fourteen years ago, to the rebel indigenous lands of Chiapas, Mexico, which led to a much longer period of study, and forced me to learn new languages and ways of doing things that, until I saw and experienced them, were alien to my New Yorker upbringing. That same admiration for grassroots movements, in April 2002, led us to be the first English-language publication (and, in fact, one of the first in Spanish) to report that international media claims that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had “resigned” were false, that instead a military coup d’etat was underway and he had been kidnapped. And we reported the popular movement that overturned that coup in three days and, as best we could from a distance, how it happened. Weeks later I was in Caracas, talking with the people in the neighborhoods, and especially the pioneers of its community radio and television and alternative media who broke the information blockade and mobilized the public that April, and also spent a total of twelve hours in the company of President Chávez, who I consider a very smart man, listening carefully to his analysis of what had happened.

That same need to understand how change is made has brought me, over the years, to the coca growing lands of Bolivia, the gigantic cities of Brazil, and, in the summer of 2009, to most states in the country of Honduras which was suffering – and continues to be plagued by the consequences of – a bloody coup d’etat. We have reported on the social movements from all 31 Mexican states and its capital. We have reported on successful movements and also those that have not yet succeeded, and have seen the details of what strategies and tactics more often bring victory, and which more often keep peoples mired in defeat. When other media, including “alternative media,” have pointed their cameras and microphones up above, at the heads of state and the machinations of those in power during periods of popular revolt and change, Narco News has instead gone to the streets and country roads where the people struggle from below, and provided their voices and wisdom a larger audience than they otherwise would have had for their grievances, dreams and the lessons of their unique experience.

For the past fourteen years, events in Latin America have dominated my interest, ignited my passions, and those two motives have always guided my journalism. For much of 2008, when a community organizing renaissance began anew in the United States (a process still underway, as we watch events unfold in Madison, Wisconsin), with the help of our readers, I went to study and report it: In Nevada, in Texas, in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and offered my findings to gatherings of community organizers at universities in the aforementioned Madison and in Chicago, as well as via these pages.

Now comes Northern Africa where the hands of thousands write new chapters in the history of human resistance against imposition and dictatorship. The people of Egypt, I suspect, have changed everything in the global equation and in one fell swoop have sent the nation-states and their leaders scrambling to understand how the old geopolitical map, still so soiled by the Cold War hangover, is useless to them now. It was the revolt by Tunisians and toppling of their authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali that ricocheted into the hearts and minds of Egyptians, who have now inspired civil resistances in Yemen, Algeria, and elsewhere, most grippingly at this moment in Libya.

Events in Libya today are the straw that is breaking the old geopolitical camel’s back, and just as Egypt is placing new realities on the imperial capital of Washington DC, Libya presents a wake up call for the rival capitals whose leaders place themselves in resistance to US imposed hegemony.

The name of Muammar al-Gaddafi is spelled many ways around the world (Khadafi, Qaddafi, etcetera) but today – at this moment when so many of its more than six million citizens are in open revolt against his rule - it is spelled D-E-S-P-O-T. And that brings a lot of sadness as he culminates his betrayal of all the original hope and promise of the Green Revolution he led in 1969, which the author Hakim Bey once described as fusing philosophical underpinnings of “anarco-syndicalism” with “Sufi mysticism” and held out the possibility of an authentically “radical Islam.”

But let’s face reality: Gaddafi’s Green Revolution mutated into something far more sinister, and what is left is anything but revolutionary.

"Little of the luster of 1969 remains with the old man. He is a caricature of the aged revolutionary. We are far from the 'revolutionary instigator' whose watchword was 'the masses take command of their destiny and their wealth.' The game will be up when the military tilts its support..."

Yesterday, I watched Gaddafi’s seventy-minute long televised speech, a rambling, manic rant that no observer could reasonably interpret as anything other than the self-destruction of a once great young man, now a senile, vicious and mentally unstable old fool.

Amy Davidson, senior editor of The New Yorker, watched it, too. Gaddafi’s speech was as mortifying and Looney Tunes as she, too, observed:

To watch the speech Muammar Qaddafi gave today is to feel very frightened for Libya. It is not simply that he talked about killing and love in one breath—“purifying their tribes” by executing protesters being something that “those who love Muammar Qaddafi” should do—or that he swore never to leave a post he denied having; denied that he had ordered any shootings after days of automatic gunfire (but said, “When I do, everything will burn”); called protesters drug-taking “rats” who Libyans should “attack in their lairs” (elsewhere, he called them “cats”); took out his “Green Book” and made a show of reading it, like a cross between Ophelia and Captain Queeg, as he mused about betrayal and glory, martyrdom and “masters in Washington and London,” his grandfather and Libya’s grand reputation; or that, when he finished speaking, he extended his hand to a supporter for a kiss. It was all of those things, adding up to the suspicion that a great many lives are in the hands of a man who may be not only megalomaniacal and deluded but actually deranged.

If you have been monitoring the international media for hard facts (and proof of them) about what is actually happening in Libya, you have probably spent many hours, as we have, tuned in to the Pan-Arabic TV news network Al Jazeera, which has also been so important recently as a source on news from Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and throughout Arab lands. There, incontrovertible proof, images and eyewitness testimony have documented the scale of the atrocity that Gaddafi is committing against his country’s own citizens: the deployment of military soldiers and paramilitary mercenaries with orders to shoot at protesters, the burning alive of soldiers who refused to do so, the use of military jets to strafe the crowds under a rain of bullet fire (as Juan Cole points out, this is eerily reminiscent of Mussolini’s 1930s aerial bombardments of Libya to impose a “Roman Peace” upon its people).

And so it is especially disheartening to see and hear some of the heroic and historic leaders of revolutionary Latin America praise Gaddafi (Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega went so far as to claim that Gaddafi “is again waging a great battle”) at this moment when Libyan dictator behaves like Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza, Augusto Pinochet, Hugo Banzer, Carlos Andres Perez and every other despicable war criminal and dictator the Western Hemisphere has suffered and which Boliviarian América rose up to topple.

While it is true that in better days Gaddafi aided and supported revolutionary movements in Latin America, these are movements which have not hesitated to dispose of their own traitors from within and so it is sadly astounding to witness the acrobatics with which some leaders (and their State owned media, I will get to that in a moment) are evidently obfuscating and clumsily attempting to defend, or at least provide a smokescreen of cover for, Gaddafi’s indefensible actions at present.

More wily and clever than Ortega’s bombastic show of solidarity with Gaddafi – and thus, more disappointing, because he should know better – was Fidel Castro’s column yesterday, in which he argued:

“One can be in agreement with Gaddafi or not. The world has been invaded with all kind of news, especially through the mass media. We shall have to wait the time needed to discover precisely how much is truth or lies, or a mix of the events, of all kinds, which, in the midst of chaos, have been taking place in Libya.”

Of course, to the extent that it has been difficult to get the true facts out of Libya is almost entirely a consequence of Gaddafi’s own actions: he has shut down the Internet, cell phones and land lines, banned foreign journalists, and done everything a tyrant can do to prevent the sifting of Castro’s “truth or lies.” And yet Gaddafi’s own words are clear as day: A call for his supporters to go house by house and kill any citizen who dissents, “attack their lairs,” he said... the crazed exaltation of “purifying the tribes” and the promise that “everything will burn.” That his words have been made real by bloody actions on a massive scale has been meticulously documented on Al Jazeera, on YouTube and in testimony from Libyans who escaped across the border as well as that of military and diplomatic officials who have defected. Castro’s call to “wait and see” at an hour of moral crisis is a call for consent and complicity with genocide.

Somewhat less skillful, on Castro’s part, has been his ham-handed attempt to shift the attention from the atrocity underway to a hypothetical one: His statement that, “the United States is totally unconcerned about peace in Libya and will not hesitate to give NATO the order to invade that rich country, possibly in a matter of hours or a few days.”

First of all, what could NATO possibly do to the Libyan people that Gaddafi isn’t already doing?

Second of all, the rapid rate at which Gaddafi’s own military officers, diplomats, even his Interior Minister, have defected and sided with the protesters, as well as the total control the resistance has assumed of the nation’s second most important city of Benghazi, the defection of tribal leaders who control many of the oil producing lands of the south, all these events indicate that it is not NATO or foreign powers that will most quickly dispose of the despot, but the very people he has governed for 42 years.

The popular rejection of Gaddafi this week has not been led by the imperialist West (which, since 2001, has worked in harmony with Gaddafi after he joined harmoniously with George W. Bush’s “war on terror”), but, rather, by Libyans. And the Libyan people have now been joined by all of Pan-Arabia. Yesterday, the League of Arab Nations (Kuwait, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Dijibouti, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Mauritania, Comoros & Somalia) kicked Gaddafi’s representative out of their meetings and suspended Libya from the organization, calling on him to cease the violent repression of demonstrators. And while it is true that many of these states are essentially US allies and clients, it is more the rumbling in their own streets by the regional Pan-Arabic movement toward freedom that has them sweating and so eager to divorce themselves from Gaddafi’s crimes. The proverbial “Arab Street,” suddenly awake and on the move, is speaking through them. And their distancing from Libya’s go-down-in-flames response to rebellion portends well for movements in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria and elsewhere that are following Tunisian and Egyptian footsteps today because it indicates that other heads of state and dictators are learning that absolute repression of the kind attempted by Mubarak in Egypt, and even more severely by Gaddafi in Libya, isn’t going to save their asses or their regimes. Notably, some are now bending over backwards to make concessions to pro-democracy movements in their lands, and a great regional awakening marches on.

Perhaps reading these words, kind reader, you have found some of the information new or useful. Much of it has also been reported by Al Jazeera from an Arab perspective. And, as in Egypt just days ago (yes, it seems like an eternity already), the Gaddafi regime is blaming the messengers:

At a news conference in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, on Tuesday, a government spokesman said: "We used to respect our brothers in Qatar, but the brothers in Qatar directed Al Jazeera to incitement and to spread lies. They directed hired Libyan and Egyptian sheiks that have Qatari citizenship and high monthly salaries to start this conspiracy."

This is exactly how the Honduran coup regime and that of Iranian president Mamoud Ahmedinejad responded to civil resistances in their countries in 2009: blame the media. The Honduran coup rulers shut down the Internet, deported reporters from TeleSur, and to this day it remains the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, assassinating them at a faster pace than in tyrannies twenty times its size. The Iranian regime did the same: shut off the Internet and deported reporters from BBC Persia.

Which brings us to the sticky matter of TeleSur, the six-year-old TV network based in Venezuela, funded largely by that government and, to a lesser extent, by those of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Uruguay. On its first day of broadcasting, I wrote an essay, Welcome TeleSur to the Struggle to Light Up the Skies. There had been so much distortion by the Commercial Media, internationally and in Latin America, of events down here that I and many others eagerly grasped on to TeleSur and held out the hand of friendship and alliance.

Six years later, TeleSur is widely considered among much of the Latin American left to be a colossal flop and a predictable formulaic bore, a project so steeped in its own bureaucracy and conflicting loyalties that it is an understatement to say it “has not lived up to its potential.” In the past year, it has participated in the demonization of the historic indigenous movements in Latin America, absurdly attempting to tag the continent’s original peoples as imperialist agents of the United States, largely based on the McCarthyist falsehoods of one of its commentators, the North American lawyer Eva Golinger. If you have not read about what occurred last October to cause a massive grassroots backlash from so much of the Latin American left against TeleSur’s shoddy “journalism,” this story, by Narco News reporters Fernando Leon and Erin Rosa, is illuminating, to say the least.

But it is the Pan-Arabian resistance that has shaken the wheels off of TeleSur altogether. While citizen journalists in Libya courageously break the information blockade to post videos on YouTube and elsewhere to show the carnage wrought by the death throes of the Gaddafi regime, while Al Jazeera and other international media document beyond a reasonable doubt the war crimes it is committing, TeleSur has treated its viewers to a total cover-up and whitewashed version of events in Libya. It has served as a clownish propaganda vehicle for the embattled Libyan dictator.

The version of events fed to TeleSur viewers portrays Gaddafi pronouncing “I am a revolutionary,” and repeats his claims that “extremist groups are paying the demonstrators” against him without a shred of irony or proof. It portrays the dictator as defending the country of Libya from “the insults that have been made agains the Libyan people in recent days.” The subheds alone demonstrate TeleSur’s spin: “Youths receive money from extremist groups,” and, “I will fight to the last drop of my blood” and “Following the Constitution,” and “Solid Libya.”

Of course, TeleSur gave top billing to Castro’s claim of a “plan by the US for NATO to invade Libya.” Libyan demonstrators are portrayed as pillaging and burning everything in sight (“furious hordes,” a general is quoted as describing them) and that “there are no police, nor Army, nor security forces” to be found.

Not a word about the multiple massacres by Gaddafi’s troops, who according to TeleSur, contrary to repressing the people, are not even present, nor the aerial attacks by military planes on the crowds. TeleSur has reported nothing about the defections by military, diplomatic and tribal pillars of support for the regime. In sum, TeleSur is feeding a total falsehood to its viewers and calling it “news.”

Meanwhile, the self proclaimed gringa “novia de Venezuela” (that’s from her own website masthead, you can’t make this stuff up!), Eva Golinger, who accompanied Chávez to Libya, Iran, Russia and Belarus last November, complained yesterday on her Twitter feed: “Look, I’ve never defended Gaddafi! To the contrary, I am analyzing the causes of the terrible situation that is happening in Libya. I don’t know why they say that.”

Golly gee, ya think maybe the recent NY Times profile on Golinger (in which she vainly granted an interview to the known golpista reporter Simon Romero only to act surprised later on when it wasn’t as flattering as she had hoped: “The article makes me sound like some kind of propaganda queen for the Venezuelan government,” she doth protested too much) might have something to do with that impression? Here is an interesting passage from the puff-piece-gone-awry:

In October, she accompanied Mr. Chávez on a seven-country tour that included visits with Venezuelan allies like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. “Chávez presented me as his defender to Ahmadinejad,” said Ms. Golinger, describing the Iranian leader as “gentle” after giving him her book at a dinner.

She came away from the trip with her own appreciation of other Venezuelan allies like President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, who is often called Europe’s last dictator.

After meeting Mr. Lukashenko in person, she described him as “really nice.” As for Belarus itself, she said its Western critics were mistaken because it is “not a dictatorship.” Rather, she said, “It is socialism.” She praised a Belarussian agricultural town she visited. “People seemed really into their communal work and stuff like that,” she said.

To be fair, Golinger wasn’t quoted as saying anything, pro or con, about her State sponsored visit to Gaddafi’s Libya. She did call the Iranian dictator “gentle” and the Belarusian despot “really nice,” without offering a shred of criticism of the tyrannical behavior of the regimes of any of the countries she visited. A journalist-of-the-state simply does not do that if one wants to be invited on future junkets.

And that’s the point. At an hour of moral crisis it is not enough to issue smug denials that one has never defended an evil if one is not also vocally denouncing and resisting it while it is happening.

Interestingly, Venezuelan President Chávez – who recently made news sleeping in a tent that Gaddafi had gifted to him on the recent trip to Libya – has remained absolutely silent on the matter since the Libyan resistance rose up in recent days.

But I know something about how big news organizations function in their dysfunction, and TeleSur is very similar to CNN or Fox News or any other cable news network in its operating principles. I’ve had first hand dealings with various TeleSur employees and freelancers and, like their counterparts in commercial media, they live in constant, abject fear of getting “the call from Caracas” (their words) or angering their superiors. TeleSur is a viper’s nest for anyone employed there, filled with bullying middle managers and cut throat colleagues who covet each other’s jobs, with an often absent upper level management (right now TeleSur chief Andrés Izarra is virtually AWOL as he serves the dual function of Venezuela’s cabinet level Minister of Information and Communications). Many frustrated journalists throughout the hemisphere come to us for counsel when they have problems with their bureaucracies, and we’ve heard enough stories from TeleSur journalists to recognize their plight as so similar to those of corporate media employees.

So it’s not really clear if TeleSur is behaving this week as chief American propagandist for Gaddafi because a line has been handed down, or because in a dysfunctional absence of any line its panicked employees are overcompensating based on what they see as Venezuela’s geopolitical alliances. The news organization also suffers an increasing tendency that corrupts all the beautiful and good accomplishments of the Bolivarian revolution by attempting to make the news overly about one head of state and his allied heads of state rather than about an organized people. But I sense that fear plays a huge role in how previously good journalists have turned themselves into propaganda monkeys for war crimes in Libya today.

What is strangest about TeleSur’s astonishing fictionalization of the Libyan crisis is that the news organization has an existing agreement with Al Jazeera in which each network may use the video footage of the other. But none of the strongest images or reports by Al Jazeera from Libya have made it past the cutting room floor in Caracas this week.

TeleSur has thus converted into a worst-case scenario that plays into the cartoon caricature version of the Bolivarian revolution painted by its worst enemies and the bloody coup mongers of the imperial right. The damage they are doing to the cause of the Venezuelan people, a majority of whom built the Bolivarian revolution, is immeasurable. It features circus clowns like Golinger spewing half-baked conspiracy theories (her latest: that “it’s sad but reality, that what happened in Egypt was prepared in USA laboratories”). Did you catch that? Now she is defaming the Egyptian resistance and its participants who toppled a thirty-year US-propped regime as, somehow, agents of US imperialism! It’s the same exact script she used against the indigenous of Ecuador when they opposed multinational oil and mining companies imposed on them by that country’s government.

Well, this is why authentic journalists have to go to the source – in Egypt or Honduras or anywhere else where competing media try to impose their spin on events from afar – to interview the people on the ground who make history, instead of those who merely wash, spin and dry it. I look forward to reporting to you what the heroic Egyptian resistance organizers have to say about this attempt to portray them as dupes of a foreign power. But mostly, I look forward to learning the real history of the resistance that now gives birth to many resistances.

The Cold War ended twenty years ago but its vestiges have guided too many of right and left alike in a hackneyed obsession with a supposed geopolitical map. Rebellions against their enemies are portrayed as good but rebellions against their allies are defamed as the manipulations of foreign powers.

I personally have never viewed being of the left as adhering to such a geopolitical map, in which the atrocities by autocrats – be they named Gaddafi or Ahmedinejad or Mugabe or Lukashenko or Putin – are considered “gentle” or “nice” or acceptable in any way simply because they position themselves (often as mere acts of theater) as opposed to US imperialism. Likewise, I reject the vision of those on the right, who apologize and cover up for any crime against humanity if it is seen as serving US or Western interests, and in truth most of my reporting for 14 years abroad has aimed my pen and keypad directly at those US-sponsored hypocrisies and injustices, and I imagine that I will continue to do so for the rest of my years. Being on the left, to me, means that one favors freedom, justice (economic and political), human rights, authentic democracy, and full powers of assembly and speech for all, in every land, at every moment. Rebellion and resistance against all tyranny, no matter what flag it raises, is the single greatest expression of what makes us human. It is the engine of evolution of our species. And when it is done strategically, nonviolently, with discipline and creativity, it makes the greatest works of art this world has ever seen.

Here and now, on the eve of the springtime of 2011, what is, in a way, similar to the Prague Spring moment of 1968, which revealed the Czechoslovakian’s people’s yearning to be free and exposed the worst authoritarian and imperial tendencies of the former Soviet Union, we are witnesses (and hopefully participants) of this masterpiece of humanity which I will call The Civil Resistance Renaissance.

Our work, as authentic journalists, in documenting and telling its story – and training others of talent and conscience who seek to do the same - has only just begun.

"Here, the people fill the streets celebrating freedom from the government of Gaddafi. What can be seen in the streets is a new country, a country that doesn't recognize the government, where the people themselves have organized committees, are cleaning the streets, the food is gratis, the people distribute the food, they send free medical attention, and have increased their military control. On all sides are people with guns, but peace reins...

"It should be remembered that this is a country where previously very few foreign journalists entered and their uprising was done without those journalsits present, with very little communication, and the faced a ferocious repression. They have shown us terrible photos and images that we would never be able to show on television of bullet ridden bodies. The people here say that hundreds of people died last Saturday and Sunday, but they resisted, they continue fighting and at this moment they are in control of the city."

It may also be of interest to our readers that the reporter, Reed Lindsay, is a 2003 graduate of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, and we have received information from other TeleSur journalists that there is a strong debate within that news organization at present over its coverage of Libya, perhaps unprecedented in the network's six years in that journalists within the channel - the workers of the station - have strongly objected to the simulation and dishonesty that plagued TeleSur's Libya coverage up until now. As with the larger Bolivarian revolution, there are many, many people of conscience who see human rights and resistance as higher priorities than geopolitical alliances, so things have taken an interesting turn, to say the least. Let's hope to see more of it.

Since Tuesday, January 25, we have learned many things about Egypt, about State power, and about civil resistance. We have also learned that Tahrir Square is not, in fact, square. It is round. “Liberation Square” has served as a kind of Arthurian round table for the global video game that the mass media serves up as “news,” and also a Rorschach print upon which so much of the world has projected its greatest hopes and deepest fears.

Into this video game people and nations all over the world imagine our selves as players, with seats at the round table, presuming to decide Egypt’s future, pushing buttons and keypads to declare what we, as individuals, think should happen: From much of the West: Mubarak must resign, but, oh no, it can’t be Omar Suleiman who replaces him! And: This isn’t about Egypt. It’s about Obama and whether I like him or not! From Tehran, an authoritarian regime that is even worse than that of Mubarak’s also plays the game, typing: Hail the Egyptian Islamic Revolution! But don’t try this at home, kids! Armchair fetishists of “revolutionary violence” tweet and re-tweet anonymous claims that Egypt’s is a revolution of guns and riot porn footage posing as “alternative media,” To the barricades comrades! This is a military battle! And the digital evangelicals proclaim it theirs: The Twitter Revolution! The Facebook Revolt! In explanation as to why the resistance grew exponentially during the five days when the regime had shut down the Internet, the liberal technocrats offer nary a whisper.

The facts on the ground have not confirmed any of these projected fantasies. The discipline and restraint shown by the great mass of Egyptians in the resistance would, more accurately, make low-tech Gandhi prouder than they would Mao Zedong or Bill Gates. Then there have been the predictable arguments by some – Susan Estrich, today, the latest – that all this news isn’t even about Egypt: It’s about Israel! Oh, please, shut the fuck up and listen for a change. Such is the fantasy nature of video games and international “news” alike.

What gets lost in all this spin are the grievances of the only authentic players in the real-life game, those of the Egyptian people, whose demands have been consistent and clear for the past 16 days: Mubarak must go. Political prisoners must be freed. Repression must stop. The rights to expression and assembly must be protected. Free and democratic elections must be held. Those demands come from Muslims and Christians and secularlists alike, from young people with Internet and elders who don’t know what a URL is, and from every sector of workers that shut down the country’s economy with yesterday’s general strike.

As I type, the media tells us that Hosni Mubarak is about to go on national TV and many report that he will resign. This rumor happened once already in recent weeks, to no avail. We’ll believe it when we see it. If it does go that way – and I’m one who shares the hopes of those in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt that it would be most wonderful news – the debates will begin as to how and why it happened.

A year ago this week, Egyptian journalist and blogger Noha Atef, then 25, was in Mexico explaining the situation in her country to 70 journalists from 40 countries at the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism. She told of her five-year struggle exposing the repressive state police of her country and the tortures they have inflicted. She shared deeply personal history of how her family had been targeted and harassed by those police, and of her father’s death in the midst of those tensions. If there was a dry eye in the house, I did not see it.

A couple of North American participants in that gathering raised what they thought was the “most important issue” for Egyptians: “What about the Army? It helped the CIA imprison and torture people after 9/11.” I stepped in and replied in a voice heavily laced with sarcasm, “That’s right Noha! It’s not enough that you have taken on the entire national police! The sacrifices you have made are insufficient! You’re not politically correct unless you also take on the entire Armed Forces too!” Noha, as I’ve learned is her nature, responded soft-spokenly to the question about the Egyptian Army. She said, “In Egypt the police are our repressors, but the Army is of the people and is the people’s friend.” That was in February of 2010, and her statement left a number of our participants from the Western Hemisphere – where Armed Forces have historically been the worst repressors against popular movements – scratching their heads, unable to comprehend such a statement.

Then, eleven days ago, on January 28, after three days of state police terror and violence upon the peaceful protesters, the Egyptian Army came out of its barracks and, in large sand-colored tanks, into the streets. I was invited to be privy and party on that date to some of the talks among the young organizers and bloggers who have served as the ad hoc organizing network of the pro-democracy protests. A group of them were gathered with elder opposition leader Mohamed El Baradai who essentially said to them, “tell me what to say and do.” There, they decided upon a strategy and tactic to respond to the entrance of the military into the conflict. Although they really did not know what the Armed Forces would do in the streets, and feared they could be there to repress the demonstrations even more violently, they decided on a tactic in which they would fan out and cheer the arrival of the tanks, telling the soldiers they thought they were there to protect them from the dreaded national police, a gigantic act of street theater embracing the Army on a world stage as a friend of the people.

In our interview with Noha last week about the situation in her country, she repeated that sentiment: "I know many people would not believe it, as the Army in many countries is involved in the dirty work. But in Egypt it’s the opposite. Unlike policemen, the military is respected and considered a guard or a freedom fighter; I, and my generation, had our fathers serving or volunteering in the military in the years of the sixties and seventies. We believe that the Army is protecting Egypt."

The tactic worked for the most part. While peoples of other lands might have jumped immediately to the presumption that this would mean a futile street battle with heavily armed soldiers, the young Egyptian resistance strategists’ decision to respond in the most optimistic way possible made their hopes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that is classic, old school, text book nonviolent resistance strategy that carried the day.

Today, something similar has happened. Based only on the rumors that Mubarak will resign today, the resistance has apparently decided to treat it as a fait accompli, even as many news reports say that it is only an option under discussion in the halls of the Presidential Palace. By treating it as a done deal, with optimism and resolve, every minute that goes by brings them closer to making it a reality. And if Mubarak does resign today, it will be in large part because the resistance chose optimism and parlayed a rumor into reality.

And even if Mubarak does not resign today, they have further weakened his position and that of his regime simply by encouraging their countrymen and women to imagine it as if it is already so. All power comes from the barrel of imagination, after all.

We all have a lot to learn from these heroes of our time, the multi-generational, ecumenical, multi-cultural participants in the civil resistance of Egypt.

Now is not the hour to tell them what they must do or what solution they can or cannot accept.

Now is the hour to listen, look, learn from and study their moves, and apply them to our own lands and struggles.

In the end, the round table named Tahrir, or Liberation, is not a video game. And we, looking in from the outside, are not the players. It is a moment of history that belongs to the Egyptian civil resistance and to them only, one that we all can and should embrace and emulate. But let’s not get confused: They are the protagonists of history, and the rest of us are, at best, merely their students.

What is the first thing we ought to learn from them?

That's easy: What we must learn anew is the power of optimism as a cold and calculated strategy and tactic.

From September 2007 to August 2009 I crossposted 26 of my stories to The Huffington Post, mostly about US politics. Most of those stories were cheerfully featured by HuffPo editors on their publication's front page. But, as time went on, I grew uncomfortable with how that website was transparently becoming more and more sensationalist, cult-of-personality generated, and with my sense that it was pandering to panic and poutrage in order to boost hit counts, and so I lost interest in posting there anymore.

Well, now we can see why HuffPo went in that direction.

After reading media accounts last night that Arianna Huffington had sold her online publication to America Online (AOL) for $315 million US dollars, I woke up thinking, "oh, my... and now an association with the mega-corporation AOL is going to be imposed on me?"

Not so fast.

This morning I dug up my old HuffPo password and logged in to the control panel, where I was greeted with this breathless spin:

EXCITING NEWS - The Huffington Post has been acquired by AOL, instantly creating one of the biggest media companies in the world, with global, national, and local reach -- combining original reporting, opinion, video, social engagement and community, and leveraged across every platform, including the web, mobile, and tablets. Our bloggers have always been a very big part of HuffPost's identity - and will continue to be a very big part of who we are. The HuffPost blog team will continue to operate as it always has. Thank you for being such a vital part of the HuffPost family - which has suddenly gotten a whole lot bigger.

Maybe so. But that "family" (cough, cough) has simultaneously gotten a little bit smaller as a consequence. It took me all of 90 minutes this morning to erase all my content from Huffington Post and replace it with this message where the text had appeared on each of the 26 stories:

(As author and sole owner of the words in this story, I did not write them for AOL, and do not wish to have any association with it imposed upon me. The original text may still be found at http://narconews.com/thefield - Al Giordano, February 7, 2011)

This saga is, sadly, not the first or last case of a blogger or online renegade that ended up becoming swallowed by the very same inhuman mass media conglomeration that it claimed it had set out to oppose. Good luck to Huffington and company, but they'll have to cross back to the other side of the bridge without me.

And I can tell you this: As long as I live and breathe, this online newspaper - Narco News and its pages - will never be sold to a profit-making venture. That's because there is simply no way to obey the laws of advertising without compromising independence and edge. I don't care if "everybody else is doing it." Somebody has to set a higher standard around this water cooler called the Internet. Once again, it seems that it has to be us. We survived the first dot-com boom-and-bust a decade ago. And, as before, while others who went for the money will likely lose their independence and credibility, if not their existence, we'll outlive this one, too.

This is the week when we've been poring over completed applications for the 2011 School of Authentic Journalism that will convene in May in Mexico City. Applications for those 40 scholarships were due last Sunday, and very soon we'll be contacting the scholarship recipients and introducing them to all of you.

This year we received an unprecedented number of applications from "the other hemisphere," particularly from Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. And some of those folks will indeed be coming to Mexico in May. But with civil resistances rocking the Mediterranean in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, the demand among journalists, independent media and video makers, bloggers and communicators to better understand the strategic dynamics of social movements, and to advance their skills at doing authentic journalism, is so great that we've added a four-day workshop coming up in March in Madrid, specifically for colleagues reporting in that region. And since we can't bring so many superb colleagues to the Mexican mountain, we've decided to move the Mexican mountain closer to them!

The support and partnership of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict has made our first European workshop on Citizen Journalism and Civil Resistance possible, to be held March 20 to 23 in Madrid. Applications are due on Monday, January 31 (and these applications are shorter than the extensive School of Authentic Journalism application). You're invited to apply whether or not you have already applied for the j-school (being accepted for one does not preclude being invited to both). So don't be shy. And maybe we'll see you in March, in Madrid...

Today hundreds of civilian-based movements and campaigns for human rights, democracy, social justice, political freedom and other causes are being waged with participation by ordinary people, all over the world. Unfortunately, major global media broadcasters, newspapers and news services give little if any attention to the causes and work of these movements.

This workshop will cover key strategic and tactical lessons of successful movements, examine the role of independent media in civil resistance, look at the impact of digital resistance and international actors, and offer practical guidance to citizen or authentic journalists in developing stories, doing investigative field reporting, initiating video reports, and other practical aspects of citizen journalism in countries where civil resistance is now being used.

Co-hosting this workshop will be the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a nonprofit foundation based in the United States, and Narco News, the world’s pioneering organization in authentic journalism and an online newspaper that covers democracy, the drug war, and other social and political events in Latin America.

A moment from the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism in Mérida, Yucatán, México: Jim Lawson, right-hand strategist for the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., meets legendary Mexican journalist Mario Menéndez Rodríguez and his family, prior to a plenary session of the School. DR 2010 Noah Friedman-Rudovsky.

The door is still open, but it will close on Sunday, January 23, at 11:59 p.m. (Pacific Time).

That’s when completed applications are due to be eligible for one of 40 scholarships to attend the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, May 11-21, in Mexico City and environs. This ten-day intensive training program is open to anyone of any age (previous scholars have aged from 17 to 65), from any land, as long as you are fluent in either English or Spanish. You can read more about this unparalleled program, its faculty, and curriculum, at this link.

We have so far received requests for applications, as always, from throughout the Americas, from Canada to Cono Sur. We’re also seeing more and more this year from Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia (we’re especially impressed by the quantity of requests this year from Northern Africa, the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe, as our newspaper, which reports mainly events in the Western Hemisphere, was not very well known in that part of the word until apparently recently). It’s clear that the hunger and thirst for a more authentic journalism to replace the commercial media has become global. And we’re doing our best to meet the challenge.

This will be the fourth School of Authentic Journalism. Here’s how it works: Nobody pays tuition. Scholars receive training in online reporting, investigative journalism, viral video production and, this year’s theme, Movement Strategies for Journalists, because reporters that understand the underlying strategic dynamics of how political and social change is made are better, and more accurate, journalists when it comes to reporting those stories.

Scholarship recipients that wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend are also helped with their travel costs, food and lodging. We’re not looking for participants – like too many other “educational institutions” – on the basis of their ability to pay, or whether they’ve attended elite universities, or, frankly, any college at all. To the contrary, we seek you out on the criteria of your work ethic, talent, social conscience, and our sense of whether you’ll keep doing the important work of authentic journalism after the school session is over.

I could go on and on singing the praises of so many who have come through the School of Authentic Journalism program. And I’ll probably be doing that for the rest of my life, because every generation of j-school graduates excels and advances and builds upon the successes of its predecessors. It’s a school that also builds leadership, as many of the graduates return to teach what they’ve learned to newer students.

And so, if you’ve thought about applying for the School yourself, or know someone who you think should apply, this is a reminder that you have ten days left to obtain and complete your application. These are ten days that, depending on whether you do it or not, can open many, many doors to you and your work, and open new doors for all of us, to be able to count with you as part of our growing international network of Mutual Aid among independent and authentic journalists. It’s a long application, so don’t dawdle: It’s not the kind of thing you can “phone in” at the eleventh hour. It’s a different kind of application, for a different kind of School that seeks a different kind of student and journalist.

For an English language application, write to app11@narconews.com. For a Spanish language application, write to sol11@narconews.com. Get it done by deadline, January 23: these are ten days that could shake your world.